NVIDIA VXAO Comes to Rise of the Tomb Raider

A few months ago, Rise of the Tomb Raider was mentioned as having an unknown NVIDIA GameWorks technology called VXAO. In yesterday's patch for the game, everything was finally revealed, and VXAO is now ready to hit the world. VXAO stands for Voxal Ambient Occlusion and is the highest quality level of ambient occlusion available in games today. It works by voxelizing the scene in order to provide superior image quality, a smoother camera motion response, finer details, and greater accuracy than screen-space solutions. VXAO is a world-space AO algorithm, so it should help make Rise of the Tomb Raider and any other games that take advantage of it something to behold. The latest video driver, 364.51, supports the new patch in Rise of the Tomb Raider, so be sure to grab both (especially since it brings DX12 to Rise of the Tomb Raider) if you want to see what VXAO is all about.

If you're going to be attending GDC 2016, NVIDIA will offer a session on Advanced Ambient Occlusion for Modern Games, where it explains both HBAO+ Ultra and VXAO. The session runs from 5 to 6pm on Wednesday, March 16.